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Miriam is fifteen and she has lived in the same little town her whole life, going to school with the same kids who know everything about her. But now she's in high school and wishing she lived in a big city where she could meet new people and see new things. In other words, like fifteen-year-olds everywhere, Miriam is desperately waiting for her life to start happening. Something, anything -- a first love, perhaps. And then love comes, in a completely unexpected way, when Miriam meets a new classmate, Laura.

Seventeen-year-old Fern has not had many breaks in life. She struggles at school and lives with her mother in a roach-infested apartment. Then, suddenly, her mother has a heart attack and dies, and Fern is devastated. But she's a survivor, and she's not afraid of hard work. Sidestepping social services, she quits school and sets out to look after herself. With a little luck and ingenuity and a lot of determination, she manages to live rent-free by becoming a janitor in a crummy apartment building. When she runs out of toothpaste she gets freebies from dentists' offices.

While the rest of the world anticipates a victorious end to the Second World War, sixteen-year-old Sheila Brary finds life in a remote British Columbia outport suffocating and isolating. A household full of brothers, a philandering father and, most of all, Sheila's embittered mother all stand in the way of a bright, beautiful teenager with ambitions and dreams -- to continue her schooling and become a nurse.

Finalist for the Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction for Young People and the IODE Violet Downey Book Award, and an American Library Association Notable Children's Book and a Kirkus Reviews Best Book It's 1941, and Canada is two years into World War II. Meanwhile, in rural Manitoba, fifteen-year-old Marie-Claire Cote begins a war of her own as she and her brother and sister, all stricken with tuberculosis, are taken by their anguished parents to "chase the cure" at nearby Pembina Hills Sanatorium.

A New York Times Editors' Choice Earthgirl follows the eco-evolution of sixteen-year-old Sabine Solomon, who is thrown into the fray one afternoon when she's riding her bike downtown to join her friends, and an idling minivan driver carelessly tosses leftovers from McDonald's out the car window, blindsiding Sabine and leaving her covered in plum sauce. When Sabine tosses the garbage back at the offensive driver, an altercation ensues that is captured on the videophones of her friends.

Winner of the CLA Young Adult Book Award, selected for the CCBC Choices List, selected for the Bankstreet College of Education's Best Children’s Books of the Year 2013, and honoured with the Horn Book Fanfare It starts when Call sees sixteen-year-old Angel stealing shoes at the mall. He just buys her Chinese food at first, but before long Call is supplying her with "candy" and saying he loves her.

Hold Fast is the widely acclaimed story of a young boy's struggle to survive in a new environment and his fight against those who stand as threats to his pride in himself and his way of life. Michael turned fourteen in May. By June, both his parents are dead, victims of a car crash. And for Michael, who has lived all his life in a small Newfoundland outport community, this means being suddenly uprooted and sent to live with relatives in St. Albert, a city hundreds of miles away. Hold Fast is the story of Michael's struggle to survive in his new world.

The car lurches to a halt.The old man finally rolls down his window, studies Laker for one eternal moment while his daughter, behind the steering wheel, fumes and listens to the radio. Laker stands, shrunken and zipped and snapped and collared inside his damp, sweaty leather jacket, and then he hears this unexpected question: Do you do yard work?

A bitterly jealous brother, a samurai who makes the ultimate sacrifice, a cold-hearted husband, a monk who mistakes desire for piety, a fraudulent merchant who meets his match in a supernatural river otter — the motives underlying these traditional Japanese folktale characters are explored with haunting results.

A Kirkus Reviews Best Book About the Past, and selected as an Honor Book by the Society of School Librarians International Teddy can't believe how fast his life has changed in just two years. When he was twelve, his father took off, and then his mother married Henry, a man Teddy despises. But Teddy has no control over his life, and adults make all the decisions, especially in 1959. Henry decides that Teddy should be sent to St. Ignatius Academy for Boys, an isolated boarding school run by the Catholic church. St.